


I'm Fine

by DenaCeleste



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Caring Hannibal Lecter, Depression, M/M, No Sex, Passive suicide attempts, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 06:39:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6144850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DenaCeleste/pseuds/DenaCeleste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not every day, but it's happening more often. Not caring one way or the other if he lives or dies. The monsters inside his head haunt him. He has the perfect mask for that, replies to every inquiry with, "I'm fine." </p><p>And everyone takes that at face value. No one really calls him on it.</p><p>Except for Hannibal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Fine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [XCuteAsHale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/XCuteAsHale/gifts).



> I wrote this at the request of my incredible friend, Cutie. Hope this helps, min skatt. You are an inspiration in so many ways. Masse glad i deg!  
> \-------  
>  **This story deals with suicidal thoughts/ideations, and a passive attempt at suicide. If this content might trigger you, PLEASE DON'T READ. Take care of yourself and your mental health.** This story is rated M for the topics addressed. 
> 
> If you need help, please seek it:  
> National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1 (800) 273-8255  
> IMAlive Online Crisis Network: http://hopeline.com/ or https://www.imalive.org/
> 
> \-----  
>  **Unless otherwise stated, all works are unbetaed. Please no public concrit. Please keep comments positive. Any private concrit can be directed to my Tumblr ask box.**

It wasn’t that he wanted to die, really. It would just be easier not to be there. Will collected his things in an overstimulated haze and walked out of the building. He took no note of the cars in the parking lot. If they stopped, if they didn’t, it really made no difference.

Sometimes the only thing that stopped him from moving to more purposeful actions were his dogs. They saved him.

Some days that was enough.

\---------

“How’re you holding up, Will?” Jack asked as they walked towards yet another scene. He asked, but he didn’t care. People always asked, but they never cared.

“I’m fine,” Will said as he dove into another living nightmare. Small bodies littered the ground, and he watched as his own hand sliced into them with a machete, creating a monster’s design.

\---------

“Please, come in, Will.” Hannibal stood back from the door and welcomed him in with that small, mysterious smile.

“Hello, Dr. Lecter. Time for our weekly meeting. What are we talking about today?” Will pasted a bright expression on his face. Okay, it was slightly mocking too, but Hannibal wouldn’t buy it unless it looked real.

Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was real or not. He tended to be more real with Hannibal than anyone else in his life.

“These sessions are for you Will. We can talk about whatever you like. Let’s start simple,” he said warmly, leaning forward in his chair. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine.” The usual answer, but when Hannibal looked slightly suspicious, Will was quick to start talking again. “You know, working with Jack isn’t easy, but I think I’m holding up a lot better.”

“Better than what?” A blank, patient wall. It was so often hard to tailor his responses to Hannibal.

“Better than when I was actually losing my mind.” He grinned, but it was more like baring his teeth.

Hannibal tilted his head in a way more animalistic than human. It was as if he heard something that Will didn’t mean to say.

What had he said? His heart pounded a bit, and his breath quickened, but he calmed himself as fast as he could.

“Are there times when you’re less than fine, dear Will?” Those eyes never left him, sussing out his every twitch.

Hannibal watched him a lot. It made Will really uncomfortable.

“Of course, doesn’t everybody have those times?”

“Yes, they do, but I’m not asking about everybody. I’m interested in you, Will. What happens at the bad times?”

He wanted to lie. He wanted so badly to lie, because whenever people ask how he is, they never want the truth.

Maybe Hannibal wanted the truth.

“Will? Do you need to talk about something else?”

“No. Um. I...some days I jus--do you ever have days when it would feel better to just. Not be? To not exist at all? My bad days are like that. I want things to be easier sometimes.” His chest hurt with the yearning for ease and simplicity.

People were often way too complicated, and being in their heads, having them trapped in his head.

“So you have suicidal ideations?” Hannibal didn’t look concerned, except maybe...that little frown. The corners of his lips were turned down just a little.

He never had to pay this much attention before. It tired him in a completely different way. It was less overwhelming, but now he was at the mercy of his own emotions instead of everyone else’s.

“I don’t know if I’d call them that.”

“What would you call them?”

“A...lack of desire to be alive? I mean, I don’t actively try to die. I just don’t always avoid it either.” He paused. “On the bad days, of course.”

“Of course.” Hannibal frowned harder, then thrust himself up from his chair. “I’m going to give you my personal number, and I want you to make me a promise.”

“What kind of promise?” He asked, but he suspected. It was always the same.

But this was Hannibal. Hannibal wasn’t like anyone else he’d ever known.

“Call me. If you feel yourself in that place, where you don’t care. Call me, and I will care for you.” He held out the card with his number scrawled on the back.

Will took the card, stared at the number. “I’ll try.”

“No!”

Will jerked his head up to look right into Hannibal’s eyes. They were on fire, almost red and burning with fierceness. The raised voice surprised him, though.

“Okay. I promise.”

\---------

“Hey, Will,” Alana said from the doorway. He nodded to her, finished talking with one of the trainees, and let out a huge sigh as the young, hopeful energy of the younger man left the room.

“Hey there.” Will began to gather his things, setting everything to rights. “What’s going on? Here to deliver another too-late warning?”

“Not my fault if Jack is fast. I tried.” Out of the corner of his eye she gave a smile, and a shrug. “Jack said that he’s watching your back. I thought I’d check to make sure that’s true.”

“Mm. Of course. Wouldn’t want his pet profiler to break and not be useful anymore.” The words left him like broken glass, and he wouldn’t be surprised if his throat was bleeding.

“Are you okay, Will? You know I’ll fight him on this if you need me to.” She put a hand on his arm, warmth seeping through the fabric, a delicate strength in every graceful line. She didn’t want the truth. She said all the right things, but he knew.

He always knew.

“I’m fine, Alana.” He aimed a smile at her, let his gaze fall to the tip of her nose.

Her hand slid away, leaving him cold again.

\---------

The lights stabbed into his eyes, and sharp, hard things crunched under his feet. His chest felt like a tight band wrapped around it, and his breath hitched every so often. He just kept walking. Towards the light.

It wouldn’t stab at him afterwards if he just let it run him over.

But instead of coming towards him, it slowed, slowed and stopped. A dark shadow came towards him, and he thought, in an absent way, that maybe it was an angel come to take him. Not that he was really religious, but anything could happen.

He’d happened.

“Will?”

Strange, the angel sounded like--like--

“Will, are you alright?” 

“Hannibal? What-why?” He squinted, the light kept him from seeing Hannibal’s expression, but it didn’t matter. He could feel what the other man felt. It radiated from him. He felt the worry. The rage. The disappointment.

That last one was the worst.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I just wanted to go for a walk.”

“Down the highway? In the evening, where it’s hardest for people to see?”

“It’s the best time.”

“Come home with me. Where are your dogs? Are they okay?”

“I locked them in. Winston, sometimes Buster too, tend to follow me if I don’t, or if I’m sleepwalking.”

The real world was quickly returning, and Hannibal grabbed him by the hand and very nearly dragged him to the car.

“So, this was deliberate.” He sounded so disapproving.

Will made a noise, flopped a hand back in forth in a so-so motion. “I really did start off wanting a walk.”

“If that were the case, you would be wearing shoes and have a dog or three. Please don’t lie to me.” That note in his voice, pleading, begging.

“Okay. I won’t.”

\---------

Hannibal drove them back to his house and bundled Will into a guest suite. Where Will stood, in the middle of the room, for however long until Hannibal returned with an arm full of towels and a sigh.

“Come on. I’ll help you clean up. I want to look at your feet.”

“Okay.”

They trooped to the bathroom, and the state of his feet didn’t really match the numbness that suffused his body. He didn’t even hiss when Hannibal gently cleaned out the grit. Emotions, his own, started to return when Hannibal began to undress him with deft, clinical touches. Not that he wore too much, but.

The first sensation to return, almost in technicolor, was the pain in his feet. And then the warmth of the water nearly scalded him, even though the handle dipped only slightly towards hot.

Shame prickled his skin even sharper than the water. There he lay, naked, with his psychiatrist cleaning him.

The bath didn’t last long before Hannibal bundled him into a towel and carefully dried him, then led him to the bed. He went away, came back with a few tubes.

“Just something to encourage healing. Your feet aren’t too bad, thankfully, but you should stay off of them for a day or two.”

Will hissed at the sting, the medicinal smell of the ointment, but otherwise had no other reaction. What he really wanted to do was hide, so he did that in the only way he could.

He shut his eyes.

But those little bodies. All the bodies, really, but the kids hit him particularly hard. Especially when they were dead, dead by his hand, the glint of the--

“Will, look at me please.” He may have tacked on the word for politeness, but his tone rendered it an order.

He often had trouble resisting Hannibal. He looked.

Those eyes, so gentle, so. No, no that couldn’t be it. He looked away, but those artistic hands, so strong and yet so fine, tipped his face back.

“I told you I’ll care for you. Please remember that.”

Will bit his lip, noticed the minute flicker of Hannibal’s eyes. “I’ll try.”

“No,” Hannibal whispered, the word imbued with the power of a shout.

“When I’m in that place, I’m not always--”

“Just do it, don’t try. Do. I won’t judge you, though I would call this slightly more than passive attempts at suicide, Will, definitely more than ideations.”

“It came on so strong, so suddenly.”

“Will, if you have enough in you to think of your dogs, to lock them in so they won’t follow, then take the extra minute to call me.”

“I’ll try.”

“Do more than try, please.” This time, the word was a true plea. Tears glittered in the darkness of Hannibal’s eyes.

“Okay.”

\---------

Morning crawled into being, the sky dawning with bruised clouds. How appropriate.

Will hobbled down to the kitchen where Hannibal poured out coffee and grabbed the proffered cup.

“Good morning, Will. How did you sleep?” Hannibal peered at him from behind his own cup.

“Good. Um, better than in a long time. Thanks for taking care of me.” A few sips later, he paused. “Why were you in that area?”

“I had a feeling. I wanted to come check on you. I brought food.” He shrugged. “I’m glad I did.”

Will looked away. “Me too.”

“I thought you promised not to lie to me.” He didn’t sound judgmental, just stating a fact in that lyrical tone of his.

Caught. “Okay, I’m glad and I’m not glad. Now that it’s a new day, that I’m out of that particular place in my mind, I’m glad. I’m not glad because that particular place in my mind is becoming more and more...familiar.”

“Maybe you should stay here for awhile.”

“Are you suggesting this as my friend or my psychiatrist?”

“Yes, I think, is the answer to that.”

The laugh huffed out of him. “No fair, using my own words like that.”

“All’s fair, dear Will.” Hannibal’s mouth quirked up, and something swooped in his belly.

He raised a brow. “Yeah, in love and war. Are you saying this is war?”

“No, it’s definitely not war.”

Struck speechless by that declaration, he gaped at the man.

Hannibal gestured with his cup. “Drink your coffee.”

\---------

Another 3 a.m. call, another body. Or bodies, he didn’t know yet because Jack wanted him cold reading it.

Great. Though this time was different, as evidenced by the man driving the Bentley he sat in. It was also hard to feel cold when one sat on heated seats.

“You really didn’t have to do this.” He sighed and slumped in the seat. Why couldn’t bodies be found at reasonable hours?

“Of course I did. Your troubles have to do with the things you see, the horrors in your mind.”

“Yes, but you’ve shadowed me before, and it didn’t...help. It didn’t fix anything.”

“You weren’t staying at my house before. This way, if you need me, I can be there far more quickly than any other options. You shouldn’t be alone.”

Time passed in a haze of blood soaked carpets and artfully arranged limbs. Just the limbs, since the heads were all in the fireplace.

After he crafted that particular design for Jack, he stared into the fireplace, meeting its gaze. Their minds would reach the heavens when he lit the fire. They’d all reunite in the end.

A hand on the back of his neck returned him to the scene. The actual scene, where people were now gathering evidence and taking photos. He kept getting lost in these killers. Maybe he really should stay with Hannibal.

He sent Alana a text. _Can you look after the dogs for me? Thanks._

\---------

It’s nearly ten in the morning. The sun shone through Hannibal’s kitchen windows. Birds even sang, and the sky was a brilliant blue.

But none of that touched him. Nothing did, and it felt like nothing ever would again. The center of his chest grew icier by the minute. He sat there and stared out, designs not his own crafting a web of shadows around him, shards of numb sadness prodding the inside of his ribcage.

“Will? Are you okay?” Warm hands descended on his shoulders, fingers spreading out, very nearly reaching the cold core of him with just that simple touch.

Nearly.

But he’s fine. He’s fine. Isn’t that the right answer? Right, but not the truth.

“No. I’m not okay,” Will whispered, almost choking on the words. His eyes stung as those strong arms moved to embrace him. To surround him. Those warm, purposeful hands came to lay over his heart.

“I’ve got you.” Quiet, powerful words, murmured right into the shell of his ear. Hannibal rested his chin on Will’s shoulder.

Will shivered. Maybe he did. Maybe he would. In the meantime, he pressed his cheek to Hannibal’s, allowed the man who loved him to be his shelter. And let that be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Again, if you need help, please do whatever you need to get it:  
> National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1 (800) 273-8255  
> IMAlive Online Crisis Network: http://hopeline.com/ or https://www.imalive.org/  
> \-----
> 
> If you'd like to chat with me about darn near anything, I'm on [Tumblr](http://denaceleste.tumblr.com) and [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/denaceleste).


End file.
